Gangsta Rap and the US Prison Boom

From The Ramparts Junious Ricardo Stanton Gangsta Rap and the US Prison Boom "Everyone bought into it, consumers included. Violence and drug use became a central theme in most rap music. I spoke to a few of my peers in the industry to get their opinions on the new trend but was told repeatedly that it was all about supply and demand. Sadly many of them even expressed that the music reinforced their prejudice of minorities." The Rap Music Conspiracy http://www.wariscrime.com/2012/05/15/news/the-rap-music-conspiracy/ I was scanning a Website I frequent that posts news articles and commentary about social economic and political issues and I came across an article entitled The Rap Music Conspiracy. I read it and the comments posted in response to it. You can go Online to http://www.wariscrime.com/2012/05/15/news/the-rap-music-conspiracy/ and read the article for yourself. It's not that deep nor does it tell us much we didn't already know if we are politically and culturally astute. What shocked me was not the tie in between Gangsta Rap and the prison incarceration boom but the fact the writer who appeared to be of European ethnic extraction who said he was in the music industry for a while was surprised by it. It's no secret the music industry has ulterior motives other than selling "units" and making money. Music is vitally important to a people. It serves as a reinforcement tool, meaning the sounds and lyrics repeated over and over again send vibrations and messages that influence the hearing, the central nervous system and even the subconscious of the listener which in turn impacts and influences him or her in specific ways. In this culture we are not taught the value of music nor its role in every day life. This is because the ruling elites don't want us to know how they use music to manipulate and control us on a minute by minute basis. This manipulation and control impacts every aspect of the culture from the religious services to advertising and entertainment. The musical cords, the values, ideas, words and mental images the songs engender shape the listeners' world view, self image, psychological and emotional state and orientation. Institutions large and small pay psychologists billions of dollars annually to tell them how to use music, images and words to impact our psyches so we believe their lies, buy their products and we remain in bondage to their vile and degenerate system. One company Archetype Discoveries Worldwide boasts on its Website exactly how they do what they do. "Archetype Discoveries Worldwide is a discovery and an education process. The Archetype Team and Archetype Manager become experts on the Archetype. They will gain in-depth knowledge of the Logic of Emotions that have been discovered. Archetype Discoveries Worldwide is committed to your satisfaction. We remain available as long as you need us to implement the Archetype Action Plan. Once we have, together, discovered an Archetype, it is YOURS. Archetype Discoveries Worldwide will not duplicate your discovery in the same culture, and will always give you priority to explore it in another culture. In contrast to traditional marketing research firms, Archetype Discoveries Worldwide does not rely on what people say. Instead these studies use a unique blend of biology, cultural anthropology, psychology, and learning theories to discover the hidden cultural forces that pre-organize the way people behave toward a product, service or concept. Unlike opinions that can change in a minute, cultural Archetypes are deeply imprinted in people's minds and strongly rooted in cultural codes. The imprints form a permanent platform for marketing, new product design, innovation and improvement of products or processes, and more effective communication strategies." http://www.archetypediscoveriesworldwide.com/new/index.html Their banner motto is "The Reptilian Always Wins" The underlining is mine. I wanted to emphasize what they are saying in their own words. They are telling us their targets are archetypes. The New Webster's Comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language defines the word archetype as: "a model or first form, the original pattern after which a thing is made or to which it corresponds." African people are the archetypes for humanity and the goal of Archetype Discoveries Worldwide is to study us so their clients, companies like AT&T, Discover Card, IBM and other Fortune 500 corporations can gain access into our biology, our psyches and cultural dynamics to use this data to manipulate and control us. Our late great warrior/writer Del Jones warned us about the negative use of mass media, culture and advanced technology by our enemies in his series of books entitled Culture Bandits. "Music is so critically important to us, that they (Europeans) have always sought to control it ever since they first came into contact with us. They understand that it floats through the whole of our culture and binds each component together in a unit of purpose... We must realize the importance of our musical culture and seize it to liberate or it will be used to further subjugate our dreams, drown our reality or destroy our children's tomorrows. Beware and be aware of the deadly Culture Bandits." Culture Bandits Vol 1 Hikeka Press page 24. It was always important for the European invader/colonizer/oppressors to control our creativity, our culture and especially our music because they realized music was an integral part of African culture. Music was the glue that held our communities together because it was a vital aspect of daily life. Once they controlled the music they moved to totally control our minds with Europeanized images, concepts and ideas so we could not create/distribute music that forged a resistance culture to united us against them. This is why they took away the drums of the captured prisoners of war they turned into slaves. Europeans learned a vital lesson from their defeat by the Maroons, Quilombos and Haitians who fiercely and uncompromisingly retained their African cultural roots using them as tools of resistance, cohesion and liberation against European domination. So when Europeans invaded a region they sent in the religious missionaries as shock troops to get indigenous people to despise their own culture, values and way of life. They used religion and Western cultural imperialism to soften the masses so they could turn them into black and brown Europeans. The used "social scientists" they called "anthropologists" to study indigenous people so they could discern how to effectively undermine their culture and justify colonialism. "Unlike the various other disciplines implicated in the production of knowledge about the subject other, anthropology was, as Kathleen Gough pointed out in the 1960s, very largely born of the colonial relationship in continental Europe, as well as in the UK. Almost as soon as it was established, its practitioners came under attack both for their complicity in a colonial order which was already in decline, and for producing studies of non-European societies which concealed, or at least understated, the dramatic impact of colonialism on the lives of ordinary people." From a review by Dr. Justin Willis of the book Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism and the Politics of Knowledge Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006, ISBN: 9780719062391 www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/641 In the modern era when Euro-American elites saw a resurgence of artistic freedom, self-consciousness, pride and liberation they moved swiftly to co-opt it or destroy it outright using economic means as well as the violence of the state (COINTELPRO). They did that in the 1960 and 70's as their response to the cultural dynamism of the Black Arts and Black Power movements. In recent years, the ruling elites moved to substitute conscious Rap and Spoken Word artists with apolitical socially decadent Africanized rhythms, beats and lyrics or a deliberate and vicious counterinsurgency in the form of Gansta Rap. Internationally the Europeans and their native puppets imported commercial clap trap and Gangsta Rap to suppress and replace conscious political artists like Bob Marley and Fela Anikulapo Kuti who infused innovative liberation music into their indigenous culture. But I digress, the article at http://www.wariscrime.com/2012/05/15/news/the-rap-music-conspiracy/ is well worth reading because it helps connect the dots between the degenerate music being promoted today and the booming prison industry. It is one explanation among many as to why and how the US morphed into the world's largest incarceration nation. Social policy and legislation are the other reasons. Keep in mind the information presented in this article is nothing new but it was from the perspective and experience of someone inside the music industry. What would go further to explain the rapid spread of Gangsta Rap would be if a radio exec came forth and revealed how corporate owned radio station programming was deliberately changed to squash conscious artists and substitute them with hard core glorification of misogyny, violence, fratricide and decadence, how that genre was put it into heavy rotation with whole stations dedicated to programming that particular format. At the same time we must also realize the values inherent in Gangsta Rap are merely a reflection of the dominant Euro-American values of: greed, unbridled ego, blood lust, violence, exploitation and dog eat dog patriarchy; only in black face. This plan was designed to drive us mad and spiritually destroy generations of black youth around the world to facilitate a moral implosion so we could not adequately resist global white supremacy. The Gangsta Rap - prison pipeline scenario is one of the reasons our community is so dysfunctional, why the prisons are bursting at the seams with more being built every year. This is why valiant souls who stand up to the filth and point out the moral rot are viciously attacked, mocked and derided by the corporate media or discredited because their views are sometimes embraced by the white nationalist/religious right. We must realize we are in a psychological and spiritual war against a truly psychopathic enemy. The sooner we wake up to this reality, coalesce and fight back by embracing African values the better off we will be. -30-